Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 76: John Is the Answer!

The sight that greeted him was nothing short of bizarre. His friends were standing amidst a graveyard of Fog Seekers; by his quick mental tally of the many grey-coded bodies, they must have repelled a wave of close to four hundred monsters. But the carnage wasn’t the source of his shock. It was the area itself.

Stretching away from their central area like a long, lit-up umbilical cord was a narrow, tunnel-shaped pathway cutting deep into the black fog from one side. It stretched far enough for him not to see its end! It was a corridor of forced light, built with an exorbitant amount of cores, with no clear purpose in his mind.

"You came back!"

The relief in their voices was palpable. Four pairs of eyes, bloodshot and heavy with exhaustion, fixed on him. They looked as if they had been through a meat grinder, their gear battered and their faces smeared with the black bloodied residue of the Fog Seekers. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"How did it go?" Luke asked, leaning heavily on his club.

Cissel didn’t wait for an answer, gesturing aggressively with her daggers toward the piles of corpses and the still-ringing air. "It seems your little mission didn’t work, John! We’ve been hitting bigger and bigger waves ever since you left. It’s like the cursed fog is trying to drown us!"

"That’s indeed weird," John muttered, his brow furrowing. He had destroyed the devices—the source of the lure as he initially thought—so the frequency should have dropped.

The only explanation was the nature of his twenty-four-hour survival quest. Perhaps the system was manually overriding the environmental logic to ensure the difficulty curve remained lethal.

Or perhaps they were too late in destroying the devices, and they already did their task of luring as many monsters around as possible. This would easily explain the scary number of Fog Seekers he kept pumping into since he started hunting the sound devices.

"Yet what’s about that thing over there?" John decided to go over this point, as they had no way of changing the bitter reality. He motioned toward the bizarre tunnel. "Were you trying to build a bridge to find me, or what?"

The question caused a collective, weary sigh to ripple through the group. The bravado they had shown earlier had been replaced by a hollow, desperate fatigue.

Luke took the lead in explaining. He detailed the hours of agony that followed John’s departure—the gnawing realisation that they were out of food and water, and the subsequent mission to locate a fertile source.

He spoke of his tracking of the right direction through the soil and their decision to burn through their core reserves to reach the potential water source and green trees in the direction he had identified.

"We used over a couple thousand cores," Ricky said, his voice laced with a bitter, blaming edge. He shot a sharp look at Luke. "And we still found nothing. Just more fog and more dirt. A couple thousand cores wasted on a wild goose chase because someone thought he was a farmer."

"I picked the right direction, I’m telling you!" Luke shot back, raising his mud-stained hands in a defensive gesture. He looked at John, pleading for some backup. "The ground gets richer and holds more water the further we head that way. You all felt the mud; you all saw the change in the soil!"

"It’s not his fault," John interrupted, his voice dropping low as a realisation hit him like a blow.

As he stood there, the adrenaline of the ten-hour hunt finally began to ebb, and in its place, a sharp, stabbing pain radiated from his stomach, alongside a faint pulsating headache.

His throat felt like it had been lined with sandpaper. In the middle of the constant combat, the coding, and the high-stakes stress, he had overlooked the most basic reality of their situation. They were starving, and their body was beginning to loudly rebel and protest.

"What do you mean?" Elena asked, her voice soft. She was still standing loyally by Luke’s side, the only one who hadn’t joined in the blame game.

"This world... It’s way bigger than any of you can imagine," John said, looking down the length of the tunnel. "I spent over ten hours roaming that blackness, and even with my abilities, I ended up walking in a massive circle around this spot. I never saw a single tree, or a single stream of running water."

The hope that had been flickering in their eyes died out, replaced by a cold, numbing dread. If John, with all the time he spent in the black fog, couldn’t find a single tree or water source, what chance did they have?

"Don’t fret," John said, his voice regaining its firm, commanding edge. He had delivered the killing blow to their morale; now it was time to provide the medicine. "You were just doing it the wrong way. I’m back now, and I’m taking charge of this mission."

Despite the tremors of exhaustion in his legs and arms, John turned and began walking toward the pathway they had carved, holding his sword up high.

"Wait, what are you planning to do?" Cissel called out, she and the others scrambling to follow him.

"Isn’t it obvious?" John paused at the mouth of the tunnel and glanced back. "You were forced to build this tunnel because you can’t survive a minute in the fog. You were pouring cores into the ground just to take a few steps. But I don’t have that limitation. I’m going to go to the end of your path, venture into the deep fog alone, and find the trees and water source. When I find it, I’ll create a direct path back and come to get you."

It was as if a fog had lifted from their own minds. They had been so blinded by hunger and the process of placing cores that they had forgotten their greatest tactical advantage: John’s immunity to the fog’s lethality.

"Take these cores then..." Cissel said, reaching for her storage. She began dumping a mountain of faint red spheres onto the ground. "There are still hundreds more inside those fresh corpses. Wait until we extract them, and you can take a thousand cores with you."

"No need," John said, waving her off. "I already have more than enough. I’ve been harvesting every single thing I killed out there for the last ten hours. My inventory is full of more than that. Just keep what you have. Store and stack every core you find from here on out. When I find the trees and water, we’re going to need them to expand a wide, permanent base there."